Jeffrey Archer Is Bad As Ever In Paper-thin 'Matter Of Honor' A Matter Of Honor By Jeffrey Archer Linden/simon & Schuster, $18.95

July 30, 1986|By Reviewed by Leonard W. Boasberg, KNT News Service

Col. Gerald Scott, a World War II hero, leaves the British army under a cloud in 1946, and the cloud hangs over his son, Adam, who has ''an open, honest face'' and ''high standards of morality.'' In 1966, the father dies, bequeathing to his son 500 pounds and an unopened letter. When Adam reads it, he considers ''how Pa's life had been wasted by the murmurings and innuendoes of lesser men.''

If Pa had opened the letter, addressed to him by none other than Hermann Goering the night before Goering committed suicide to avoid hanging as a war criminal, Pa could have promptly cleared his name. But then Jeffrey Archer could not have written A Matter of Honor.

The letter leads Adam to a Swiss bank and the discovery of a priceless 14th-century Russian icon, also sought after by the Soviets. Why, beyond the intrinsic value of the icon, are the Soviets so desperate to get their hands on it? Why does the very fate of the Free World depend upon keeping it out of their hands?

It is not giving away the plot -- the reader will guess it in the first few pages -- to reveal that the icon contains a document that will require the United States to return Alaska to the Soviets. Among the other improbabilities of the story, the reader is expected to believe that President Lyndon B. Johnson would have done so.

The novel, according to the jacket blurb, has ''the Archer trademarks,'' and so it does. The characters are one-dimensional. The dialogue is stilted. The suspense is artificial. The writing is less than pedestrian. Humor is utterly lacking.

There are a few obligatory sex scenes, as brief as English novelist and Conservative politician Archer can make them. The Moral Majority may be pleased to know that the hero rejects every opportunity to bed down with the women he encounters. (He likes to take cold showers.)

The book is littered with sloppy research and artificial surprises -- both Archer trademarks in such best sellers as Kane and Abel, The Prodigal Daughter and First Among Equals. One example of such a surprise: Two Soviet agents, a man and a woman, go on talking business for several pages, and one is led to assume they're in an office. Until, that is, the author reveals in the penultimate paragraph that the woman is nude. They're in bed. Ha! Fooled you, reader.

Sometimes the technique ends up in utter obfuscation. Good Girl, followed by Bad Soviet agent, heads for her London flat. Bad Soviet gets there first. Good Girl arrives. The reader turns the page to see what happens. Nothing happens.

Turn more pages and learn from an unreliable source that Bad Soviet got tired of waiting and left. Did he or didn't he? It's not clear. The reader guesses that maybe Good Girl went to another flat -- fooled you again, reader -- but the subject is dropped.